Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Remember making free calls to India for 5 minutes back in November using Flashphone? FlashPhone later stopped offering free calls due to huge cost involved in maintaining the service.

However It seems they found a solution to absorbing the cost. Immediately after registering on Flashphone sites, users will be able to make totally free calls to Free calls to Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg)Cyprus, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland landlines and China mobiles are available after registration.

We spoke to Skip, Founder of Flashphone today about how he managed to relaunch the Free Calling offer. Well currently its not sponsored by anyone however they are usig the Free calls offers provided by other VOIP providers and hook up their SIP services to Flashphone. This way no one actually pays for a call. There is no time limit for the calls however the actual provider might cut calls after about 3600 seconds (about 60 minutes).This could largely vary with destinations.

He also shared a secret with us that you can make calls to other destinations for FREE although each call is only 1 min long. People can try and let us know if this actually works especially for India. Although we doubt it would work for India.

When we asked about Futurephone's future plans, Skip told us that they will try to get servers everywhere - North America, South America, Europe, Russia and Asia to reduce delay. Of course, trying to get more sponsors to reduce the operating cost and pass the benefit to users by providing totally FREE Calls.

We wish Flashphone all the very best with their "Free Calls" venture and hope it lasts long so we all can make the most of it.

Since this is mostly beta, we would love to hear your feedback on this service. Let us know if this works for you. How long you could make calls and to which country. Collective feedback will then improve the flashphone service.